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let down by battery and poor lay out of those 3 buttons at the bottom. Better phones out there!

I upgraded to a Xperia S last October after having a torrid time with a Samsung Galaxy S vowing never to by a Samsung again!

The Xperia is quite sleek, lightweight and feels good in the palm of your hand. The touch screen feels nice and responsive and it is quite reasonable in its speed as you navigate through various screens and graphics on various games are quite impressive.

The above said there are three buttons on the touch screen just above the white band at the bottom that are so small even after 6 months of using the phone I constantly have to have 3+ attempts to press them correctly. I noticed when visiting a 3 shop last week this issue has been rectified in newer models but it really is frustrating.

The camera is OK but lacks sharpness is moderate/low light and the flash is quite poor so any photos in any amount of darkness are quite poor quality.

Battery life is pretty poor even when sat on idle it seems to drink the battery dry quite quickly which has led me to by a usb slot for my car cigarette lighter to charge to and from work.

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Buy it!

I love the Xperia S! The nice design of the phone gives a great feel when using it. It's not particularly thin but is still comfortable to hold and the little light up bar along the bottom looks very stylish. I like how you can change the color of the background. You can do this really on any phone but you can change the color of the special xperia background.

The 12 megapixel camera is actually better than my actual camera itself and the fact that it's playstation certified so I can actually play playstation specific games on it is so cool! I'm a huge video game addict.

The phone memory is brilliant as well! I use it heavily for taking pictures, listening to music, watching videos and all kinds of other stuff like playing on apps etc. So, the 32GB memory, naturally, really surprised me! I was expecting it to be about 10GB of memory but when I saw this I was truly impressed as it was actually bigger than my iPod! It was beating every one of my gadgets!

Seriously, anyone looking to buy this phone will not be disappointed! I've not had any problems with it so far and neither has my friends who's had one for 2 months longer than me! He loves it.

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Save yourself from annoying experiences by buying a more user-friendly phone than this.

I have never liked a phone as much as my much-loved Sony Ericsson Cedar, and I would not have gone for an upgrade if it wasn't entirely necessary. So when my 13 month old daughter spilled a cup of juice all over my Cedar and it wouldn't switch on again, I was mortified, especially because I relied heavily on the calendar in it to tell me whether I was coming or going.

So when I got to the o2 shop, I first asked for a replacement of my Cedar phone. They said that I was overdue for an upgrade but that my old phone was not in the offer. I therefore had to choose a new phone. I won't go into how I go weak at the knees at having to choose new products like this; part of the reason I joined dooyoo in the first place was to avoid this, as I can go by recommendations through the site instead of trying to work out all the pros and cons of a product myself. I told the sales assistant this and also that I wanted something similar to the Cedar model.

The assistant initially offered me a Blackberry but I thought it was too bulky and complicated to use. What caught my eye about the Sony Xperia Smartphone was the fact that it has a slide-out 'QWERTY' keyboard in addition to being touchscreen. I wasn't sure whether I'd get on with using touchscreen so I was very pleased by the keyboard aspect, and after a lot of personal hair-pulling ended up choosing this phone.

The phone is black but it comes with 3 back covers that can be changed, one of which is black, one is dark purple and the other is silver. The phone is quite large and bulky but smaller than a Blackberry. It is very smart looking- as the name suggests- and people constantly comment on how 'trendy' my phone is, especially with the slide-out keypad.

The phone was easy to set up; it was charged up and raring to go after just a few hours. The first thing I disliked about the experience of using it was the charger; because the phone can be recharged through your laptop, the charger doubles up as a USB cable, however this is annoying because if you want to charge the phone the 'traditional' way, ie using a socket, the USB bit of it which slots into the plug is very easily knocked out if it. I have given up using that and always use my laptop to charge the phone now, but that is quite annoying too as I can't move my laptop without having to move the charger and the phone attached to it - which defies the object of having a laptop, really!- and because the USB lead is quite long is often gets in the way. Needless to say I am not a fan of these new-style chargers.

I am a fairly adaptable person and I like to keep an open mind about things, so I have persisted with this phone for a few months before really getting stressed out about it. The physical slide-out keyboard is easy to use, however it requires using the phone in landscape fashion, which means that the phone senses this and automatically tilts the screen sideways. This would be fine but the phone doesn't always get it right.. It is an absolute nightmare whenever I am lying down trying to text, which I often do at night in bed as this is the only time I get to reply to people's messages properly, and I no longer find it a soothing thing to do before bed. I mostly use my phone to text, which is why the extra keypad drew me in, but it is actually not that useful when sending messages because once you have typed what you want to send you have to close the keyboard to tilt the screen back to its normal 'portrait' layout in order to send the message. Otherwise, the 'select sender' and 'send' keys are on the actual phone in portrait fashion, so you have to try to use them sides. I have tried several times to send the message while the screen is sideways and have ended up making mistakes by doing so.

Another thing that frustrates me about this phone is how sensitive it is. People keep telling me that I will get used to touchscreen but I have given it a proper go and I can't. I have smaller fingers than most people too but I seem to constantly be hitting the wrong buttons. Whenever you want to send a message you have to scroll through your contacts by running your thumb over the screen, and by doing so I have many times selected people's names by mistake. This has led to some embarrassing occasions where messages have been sent to the wrong people, so I never text anybody in a rush now, I always try to take my time about it and be absolutely sure that only the intended recipient's name has been selected. This is frustrating as I work and have a small child so I am always on the go and often in a rush. Also, I'm not convinced that this is a problem with touchscreen itself, as my husband has a different touchscreen phone and I have been able to use that easily.

It goes on. In the phone's sound settings you can set it to 'never vibrate', as I really dislike phones that vibrate- they always give me a bit of a shock. However even on this setting, the Sony Xperia 'buzzes' a little whenever you hit a key when you are typing, receive a message or a call. I really dislike this, and have dealt with it by simply using the phone a lot less than I normally would.

And more. I dislike that the phone comes with so many apps, which is one of its selling points but as I have no need for them I had just assumed that I could delete them from the phone. This is not the case. The sales assistant told me that I could sort them so that my most used apps appear first, but this is not the case either. In order to use the calendar or any other feature on my phone, including selecting my messages and contacts, I have to scroll through 4 pages of apps to find the right icons. Icons that are regularly selected move pages towards the first page of apps, supposedly to help you find them next time round, however this also annoys me because things are never where I leave them so to speak; I am forever searching for icons because they have moved. The user therefore has no control over where icons are places in the quagmire of unnecessary apps, some of which are games, many of which require internet access to render them useful.

I could go on. If I want to call someone using a new number, I can't just type the number in as with most phones. I have to first select the icon for the keypad in the apps, and as I don't often use this feature I have to search for it first. It drives me loopy.

In it's defense, the phone has an excellent camera which is of very good quality, and because it has a large memory and connects to the internet easily it is excellent for watching videos and storing data. The speakers are of good quality, very loud in fact which people who like to listen to music on their phone will particularly appreciate. The phone does try to connect to the internet too easily though; I paid for a small amount of internet use so that I could occasionally browse online when I am out, but the phone is constantly trying to connect to wifi wherever I go and if I turn this off in the settings then it stops connecting to the internet altogether, which makes it a hassle and I have since cancelled my internet subscription altogether as it is more hassle than it's worth with the fiddly keypad on top of everything else.

Because of all of this, and other niggles that I have with this phone which I think are more personal things that I won't list them all here, I went back to the o2 shop and asked to swap the phone. They said that I couldn't, so I am going to sell it on Ebay, where I think it will fetch a decent price. In the meantime I have bought a cheap phone to use while I think about buying a second-hand Cedar with the money from the sale! It really is that annoying. So I don't recommend this phone at all, especially if you are buying it new for a whopping £129.99 from your usual phone shop - mine was on contract so I at least saved myself from being annoyed about the price.